Competitive pressures will drive many of the underlining trends in 2017 across the telecommunications industry. Those operators that are able to develop and maintain efficient and agile operations will be able to continue to grow their businesses and expand profitability despite downward pressures on pricing and margins.
#1: More Pressure from OTTs
OTT players are no longer just targeting retail customers and other end users with services that can be defined as “nice-to-have”. Today, many OTT players have developed mature service offerings targeted at business customers. An example of this is Microsoft and Skype, who are trying to position themselves as providing a full solution for the communication needs of enterprises. The deep pockets and strong influence of these OTT players are placing tremendous pressure on telcos, especially small and mid-sized operators.
These competitive pressures will clearly continue in 2017 and beyond. To continue to compete with OTT players and maintain profitability, operators will need to improve their operational efficiency and likely have to contend with reduced budgets. Operators will need to become highly agile and the support systems that they use will need to be efficiently adapted to ongoing changes in market conditions. This means that adjustments to business workflows will need to be implement quickly and not take weeks and months as for change requests to be processed.
Arnd
Baranowski,
CEO,
Oculeus
#2: Urgent Need to Address Fraud
Fraud and the revenue losses caused by fraudulent network usage are ongoing problems effecting telecom operators and other providers of voice-based services around the world. Surprisingly, most carriers do not allocate the necessary resources to effectively combat fraud and are struggling to keep up with the constantly changing methods used by fraudsters. These criminals operate very fast and are constantly scanning the networks of telecom operators with the advanced technologies for new vulnerabilities and openings for their fraudulent activities.
Existing practices and tools used by services providers are insufficient. Most focus on detecting fraud only after it has occurred and revenue has been lost. As prices and profit margins continue to fall, the consequences of fraud have a greater impact on the bottom line of operators than ever before. This is causing a technological shift in fraud prevention systems and in the coming year the focus of fraud prevention efforts will evolve from detecting fraud after it occurs to preventing fraud before it happens.
#3: Origin-Based Pricing
The coming year will also see many operators improve margins by implementing origin-based pricing. Origin-based pricing is a charging method that is growing in importance due to European Union requirements that regulate that all intra-European Union calls should be treated like national calls. In order to not lose the entire margins on calls originating outside the European Union into the European Union, origin-based pricing is a must. For example, a call from France to Germany, which are two countries in the European Union, will be significantly less expensive than call from an African country to Germany.
Origin-based pricing is mostly effecting international wholesale carriers, who will need to be in the position to efficiently update their pricing and implement a mechanism into their OSS/BSS processes and systems to match traffic origins with appropriate rates and surcharges.
About The Author:
Arnd Baranowski is the CEO of Oculeus, a leading provider of innovative OSS/BSS solutions for telecommunications companies and mobile operators worldwide.
